Players tend to treat horses like motorcycles: They are vehicles which can go anywhere you can walk, will never wander off, have no fear, feel no pain, and can travel at top speed for as long as you like.

And if you think players abuse the rules surrounding backpacks, just wait until they get their hands on the greatest of all interdimensional containers, saddlebags.

When I play I often refuse to ride (and put no points into the skill), and insist on travelling by cart. The players hate me right up until it comes time for an encumberance check, when I become the bestest friend everyone ever had.

Man, ain’t that the truth? They either abuse horses and saddlebags, or they go through horses like water, buying one at each town they come to, since they always seem to be going into places that are inaccessible to horses (and yet, they buy them to travel TO these places…then end up leaving them at the entrance). Amusingly, as a result, the players in my current campaign have a rule: never name your horse. Hehehe.

Perfect, I once played a BESM campaign where i was a gnome mage with “hammerspace” or literally, the area behind my back underneath the trenchcoat was a garage sized area that could hold a car (modern setting) and all the weapons and gear that we could need. saved us time and worries, but we abused it horribly.

Always hilarious Shamus!
The hardest I have laughed yet in the series was the “wearing enough metal to make a buick” so if he could swim it so could the horses. Caught me off-guard. I look forward to reading it every MWF.

Ahaha saddlebags. They transcend RP phenomena. Anyone remember the magical saddlebag (permanently attached to horse) in Harvest Moon: Back to Nature? Anything you put in the saddlebag would automatically go into the sales bin. It didn’t matter how many squishy tomatoes you stuffed in it.

Um, El Capitan? You do know that it’s a running gag in this strip that the players can’t remember the names of any of the people and places, right?
The author knows it’s Rivendale. The player probably can’t remember his own character’s name. ;)

There is one way to get around this: have 1 player make a character that is completely attached to his/her horse at the hip. A knight with a lance. A peddler with a cart. Etc. This guarantees that (1.) all horses traveling with the party get considered in methods of travel, and (2.) nobody violates encumbrance rules. It’s a win-win situation for players and DM alike.

Best of all, (3.) dead horses can be rendered down for emergency food rations.

Ah, the horse – source of more RPG arguments than anything but Diplomacy. Having a player with some horse experience is invaluable in a game.

Aside: I once got flamed on the WotC boards for suggesting that a person would move slower through shin-deep mud than a horse would. I was told that deep mud kills horses; having grown up in a rural area, this was news to me.

(Yes, horses can catch some pretty nasty conditions from deep mud, but that’s like saying that a cut from a rusty nail kills you instantly.)

Always…ALWAYS ask the PC “What are you doing with your horses”. If you forget and you can’t convince they players they shouldn’t have them, kill the horses off at the next most inconvenient for the players.

My gaming groups will beg/borrow/steal/buy a portable hole as quick as they can. NOT ONLY will it hold all the loot. It can carry the dead/petrified PC’s and even be an offensive weapon.

Two characters, an illusionist and a bard, found themselves in a treasure room with a statue of a rather nasty dwarf with a hammer for one hand and a spike for the other. Spidy-sense told them it was a guardian.
Knowing they would get pulped if they activated it, they opened up the portable hole immediately in front of the statue. One character touched a chest while the other stood by the hole. The golem animated and fell into the hole where he was wrapped up.

The illusionist and bard made off with the loot and the golem was saved for the following week when the party’s fighters would rejoin the game.

Of course Aragorn is using logic now. Ever since he found out he was king, he’s been going to night school to learn how to be a king. (Next week, he learns the air speed velocity of an unladen swallow. The week after, he finds what he had learned the previous week is only for African swallows.)

OldschoolGM “If you forget and you can't convince they players they shouldn't have them, kill the horses off at the next most inconvenient for the players.”

I definitely agree with oldschoolGM, if a player abuses a rule and gets away with it, I usually make them pay in spades later. It’s a karma thing :)
P.S. – I once had a player cry when I killed her dapple grey gelding she named Shadow Mist. She spent 30 minutes writing its description and personality, I think I killed it the first five minutes of game play. C’est la gare

drezta Says:
it gets worse in campaigns were there is loot and the party is carrying a city sized pile of gold coins between them

In the campaign I’m currently part of, a significant amount of gold was stolen from the town coffers. We managed to find it… only to discover that 30,000 gold pieces in a large-ish chest is just a *bit* more than the Earth Genasi Barbarian with 20 STR was able to carry.

At least he was able to push the chest to where the horses were. Quadrapeds get that extra bonus for bein’ 4-legged, dontcha know.

I was in a campaign recently when the departure of a player happened to coincide with our party entering a dungeon. Throughout our dungeon crawl, I kept voicing my fear that Alestor was sitting up there in his camp, eating our horses. When we made it out of the dungeon, discovering that several months had passed, we discovered the DMs had been listening; Alestor had indeed eaten the horses.

But horses can also be fun for a referee. I have a player in one game who has a horse that faints whenever it feels threatened. Now sometimes the horse is actually fainting – especially when blood splashes nearby – but most of the time it has learned that if it falls down that #1, his owner runs over and kills all the monsters nearby and then #2, the horse then gets a big food treat when it ‘wakes up’.

To #35 – Thank you for Quest Map, which apparently gives better directions than Mapquest. :-D

And to #31… It’s not that he’s using logic. More like he hit the merry-go-round and kept it spinning until he figured out the best way to push the DM off. It wasn’t well-reasoned arguments, it was grasping at straws and actually grabbing the correct one.

A week ago yesterday at our D&D game my Gnome Paladin declared that he was going to cram the clockwork spider we had just defeated into his saddlebag to sell to mechanics back in the city.

The same saddlebags he had crammed all the metal ingots in from the workshop earlier.

The same saddlebags that on an earlier quest we stuck the secret book in, dismissed the mount while the guards trying to keep the book from getting home searched the PCs, and then re-summoned in the sanctuary of the church that wanted the book… at least that led to RP with the priest outraged at a camel in his church.

Horses aren’t worth the trouble unless the campaign is set up to avoid problems. You’re okay if all the encounters happen in or near towns, on the same continent, etc.

If your adventures require you to cross oceans, hang out in floating castles, or go to other planes or other such nonsense, horses are right out.

In my current campaign, we’re 11th level and our butts have only touched the backs of horses once since 1st level. The horses were provided to us by our employer and we dropped them off at our destination town.

Other than that, we walk, take boats, airships, sleds, fly, teleport, etc.

I don’t know what’s funnier, that the King of Gondor is trying to figure out how to finagle his horse onto a ship when he literally owns entire herds of horses just outside his window, or that the DM has forgotten that a King doesn’t need to carry horses through tunnels and across rivers, a King just needs to say “I need a horse. And two more for my buddies.” I’m pretty sure by the time he got outside, he’d have three horses saddled up. And I’m quite certain that for this character one horse is as good as another.

It’s good to be the king.

One reason I enjoy running low level campaigns is that I don’t have to kill myself trying to overcome the game-breaking capabilities of certain magic items. I know a player who turned a bag of holding into an extra-dimensional kingdom where he raises dragons. I guess those were old D&D rules, but his character still has the castle and the dragons, so I guess it was all grandfathered in…

One of my favorite DM moments was when the group of characters in my campaign finally killed off a major dragon in his lair, complete with the fairy-tale pile of gold and treasure. Oh they were really happy, until they realized that between them they could only carry a tiny fraction of the treasure trove. Undeterred one player came up with the idea of building a cart and capturing some wild goats to pull it. Unfortunately the cart building and goat herding kept getting interrupted by brigands who had somehow heard the news that the dragon was dead. Pretty soon they were besieged in the dragon lair, running out of food and water.

The lead player finally vented his frustration, accusing me of deliberately thwarting their attempts to recover all the treasure. My response was “Well, for years this treasure trove has been the envy of every brigand, raider, bandit or nearby king, but they had given up on killing the dragon to get it. Now they just have to kill you.”

They finally got the message, grabbed the choicest loot they could, and scampered out the back secret passage. Behind them they heard the beginning of an epic battle.

For those not in the know, Purple Library Guy is (was?) an institution at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby. An eclectic and highly recognizable character. There was an interview with him in the Peak student newspaper (he apparently has a real name too, but it’s less memorable) and even a comic strip featuring him.

I find myself amazed that most who ride horses, like Roy from OOTS, have 2 or fewer ranks in ride. Why don’t opponents dethrone them then take the AOO as they stand up more often?

Also, there is another great solution to the horse problem: Phantom Steed. Lost it? It vanished, no worries. Need one again? Recast it. My gnome illusionist (w/Shadowcraft Mage) can make one of those last all day, and it’s a great way to bypass the whole issue of mud, snow, crossing a body of water, etc. I’m surprised more don’t take it.